Oct. 7, 1933-June 19, 2017

The Hon. Justice Saul Nosanchuk, known and admired for his innovative and compassionate sentences for those who came before him on the Windsor bench during his 29-year tenure, has died.

He was 83.

Nosanchuk died peacefully Monday night at a Tecumseh long-term care home after a two-year period of declining health.

“He loved the law, he honest to God did,” said Nosanchuk’s widow Nancy.

“And he was interested in all the people. He was very interested in people, and he was well loved by the lawyers, the other judges and the people he sentenced.”

Born in Windsor in 1933 to Belarusian Jewish immigrants Boris and Anna Nosanchuk, he spent his early years delivering groceries for the family-owned market, and cited that formative early experience in a 2005 interview on his retirement.

“I could never imagine my parents not caring for any person who walked into that store,” Nosanchuk said.

“We were to be solicitous and concerned and deliver the best possible service. That really set the model for me on how people ought to be treated.

“And as a judge I want people to know that when they walk into my courtroom, we are delivering justice in a calm atmosphere where people will feel they are treated fairly.”

Nosanchuk studied at Assumption University and then moved to Toronto to attend the Osgoode Hall Law School before returning to Windsor to take up criminal law in 1959.

Nosanchuk was appointed to the bench in 1976.

Nancy said the case that meant the most to her husband was the 1995 sentencing of Kevin Hollinsky.

Hollinsky, 19, was behind the wheel of a car on Wyandotte Street in July 1994 that crashed, killing his two best friends who were passengers.

He was found to have a blood alcohol level over the legal limit, but after the families of Hollinsky’s two dead friends asked he be kept out of jail, Nosanchuk sentenced him to 750 hours of community service, much of it spent speaking to high school students about the dangers of drinking and driving.

“It changed law in the sense that it was a different kind of sentence, in that the person did not go to jail,” Nancy said.

“It was a restorative justice sentence.”

Nancy said her husband was also passionate about jazz, art and travel.

Current Ontario Court Justice Lloyd Dean was a close friend of Nosanchuk’s for 30 years.

Dean recalls when he was just starting law school a mutual acquaintance gave him a letter to bring to Nosanchuk at court.

“I passed it to the clerk and she went back and she said Justice Nosanchuk wants to see you, come on in,” said Dean.

“And from that day forward, first as a mentor, then a professor at law school and, ultimately, he was a dear friend.”

Dean said he has three pictures on his office walls, one of his parents, one of his great-grandfather, and one of himself and Nosanchuk.

“He cared and loved for people to a fault,” said Dean.

“That was what really drove him in everything that he did. He cared about people and there are maybe five or six people in my life — when if you look at me and see me as a patchwork quilt — he would have one of those squares.

“I try and model a lot of what I do in the courtroom after him.”

Dean recalled a time when he was a Crown prosecutor and Nosanchuk called him late one night concerned that he had been too hard on a defence lawyer earlier that day.

“It really bothered him, he thought he had lost his cool and maybe had been a bit too rough and I was the prosecutor and he asked me if I thought he should call her,” Dean said.

“I said I thought he should, so he called that defence lawyer and I know that that defence lawyer, that really touched her that he called and apologized and said he could have handled it in a different way.”

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